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02 May 2011

Things about tourism management.

In reply to a demand of one of my readers who named himself or herself curious in my chat box, as what that is stated above, this post is going to be my experience of being a tourism management student regardless of which university I'm currently studying at. This special demand actually makes me realize how long I have not been blogging about my life in Taylor's University like how I usually did before, and how long I have not been blogging crazily like how I did in the past. However, this post is not only dedicated to curious I suppose, but I'm talking this to those of you who are interested, or may have misunderstood something about tourism management. Please have a seat, thank you very much. :P

Many of you out there think that geography and history both play the most important roles in tourism industry including me myself before I started my course in this university, and most of you out there think that taking tourism courses only leads a person to tour guiding in the near future. That's what I have been hearing from people around who may not know clearly what tourism management is all about; in actual fact, there are still several differences when it comes to tourism management, and tour guiding is no longer the one and the only future of a tourism management student like how you think it is. In my opinion and from what I see in this travel agent where I'm currently doing my internship at, ticketing using some particular systems like Galileo, Abacus, and Amadeus, and the way you handle problems related to customers are what that play the most important roles in tourism management instead. Please don't get confused my dear readers; tourism management is mainly about managing a tour including things like ticketing, dealing with the customers about itineraries and prices, dealing with the customers with unreasonable complaints at times, and such but tour guiding is mainly about guiding a group of people to the appointed destinations. These are just based on what I have been observing so far, but in reality there're still a whole lot of things that are yet to be learned and observed. Geography and history as mentioned earlier are instead something pretty basic that you would learn through your very own experiences.

Since I'm taking diploma course, I'm basically learning things theoretically like geography, customer services, transportation operations, tourist destinations around South East Asia or everywhere around the world especially those famous ones, accommodations, principles of accounting, mathematics, and et cetera which indeed, some of them don't seem to be helpful but who knows? Nonetheless, several visitations to different tourism-related places according to where the university wants you to visit to, such as travel agents, tourist information centers, and tourist destinations at certain places like Kuala Lumpur, are as well included that different term has different theme and those are supposedly the most exciting subject among all I guess. :P Certainly, language classes like English class, French class that starts from term 4 as this is a French diploma, and Bahasa Kebangsaan class for those who do not have credit on SPM (only Bahasa Malaysia) and those who do not take SPM back in form 5, are pretty much compulsory and are all included; in this university they wouldn't be included in every single term but it depends, while I'm not too sure about how the others operate.

In my personal opinion, the negative side about tourism management is that some people who may have not done enough researching would probably regret of choosing this course due to what subjects that are included that they are not able to handle, thus the continuous failures, yelling over boringness and complaints about anything when there's nothing to be complained about happened repeatedly, especially those who're planning to take event management but they're forced to go through this course before they have enough requirements to continue the bachelor course. These are exactly what that are happening around my classmates; well surely, some have already left earlier while some are still there crying over failures. Alamak! Similar situations have been repeating over and over again since term one that it seems as if I have use to it yet sometimes it gets on my nerves. :|

These are basically what tourism management is all about so far, and they're all based on my true personal experiences that do not include any copy-and-paste actions that are just so not my type of blogging, for your information. :) Did I mention that this post has nothing about my university? I have included some, though, but those are just purely for your references to be frank; I'm not that kind of person who fully supports his or her university in case you don't know. Anyway, I hope this helps you on your choosing despite the wordiness that might bother you a lot, but I don't find any other way to summarize everything. :P For further information, please feel free to drop me an email (min92min@hotmail.com) and I will try to answer as long as I can.